Chapter 1: Article One
Auror Witness Protection Protocol, Article One, ran to a single line, and Harry had written it himself.
The protecting officer shall not touch the witness except to preserve life.
He'd written it four years ago, after a junior Auror called Dawlish the Younger had fallen in love with a goblin-smuggling informant in a safe house in Swansea and let her talk him into a walk on the beach, where she had been hit with a Blasting Curse from a passing fishing boat. Dawlish had survived. The informant hadn't. Harry had sat with Dawlish in Saint Mungo's afterwards while the man cried into his bandages and said, over and over, I just wanted to hold her hand.
So: Article One. No exceptions. Every protection officer signed it, and Harry had signed it nine times, once for every witness he had personally guarded, and he had never once found it difficult to keep.
Then Robards put the file on his desk on a Monday morning in October, and he opened it, and Draconia Malfoy looked up at him from the photograph with an expression of profound irritation, and he thought, oh, no.
"She found it," Robards said. He was standing at the window of the Head Auror's office with his hands behind his back, looking at the enchanted view of a rainy Whitehall. "The whole network. Every cursed object that's gone through Knockturn Alley in the last three years, every buyer, every Ministry official who signed off on an import licence he shouldn't have. She was hired by Gringotts to break the curse on a single snuffbox and she followed the snuffbox all the way to the Department of Magical Transportation." He turned round. "She testifies before the full Wizengamot in a week. Until then, someone very well connected wants her dead. Three attempts since Friday. The last one was a cursed letter-opener left on her desk at Gringotts. She recognised the hex from across the room and threw a teapot at it."
"Sounds like she can look after herself."
"She can. She told me so, at length. She also told me she would accept protection from exactly one Auror, and she named you." Robards raised his eyebrows. "I didn't know you two were friends."
"We're not," said Harry. "We haven't spoken in about ten years."
"Then you'd better start," said Robards, "because you're leaving in an hour."
The safe house was a stone farmhouse on the moors above Haworth, under a Fidelius Charm with Robards as Secret-Keeper. It had three bedrooms, a woodburner, a kitchen table scarred by a century of Muggle farmers, and a view across miles of brown heather and grey sky to a horizon so empty it made your ears ring. Harry had used it twice before. He liked it. You could see anyone coming for a mile.
Draconia Malfoy hated it on sight.
"It's a barn," she said, standing in the doorway in a long black travelling coat with her trunk floating behind her. "You've brought me to a barn."
"It's a farmhouse."
"It smells of sheep."
"There are sheep," Harry agreed. "About four hundred. They're very good at noticing strangers." He took her trunk out of the air and set it down. "Your room's at the top of the stairs on the left. Mine's opposite. The wards go out to the drystone wall. Don't cross it. Don't open the windows after dark. Don't send owls. Don't use the Floo. If I say get down, get down; don't ask why."
She looked at him. She was twenty-nine, as he was, and it suited her better than it did him. Her hair was still that improbable white-blonde, cut shorter now, to her jaw, and it swung when she turned her head. Her face had lost all the pointy sullen softness it had had at the trials and settled into something sharp and fine and watchful. She wore no jewellery except a curse-breaker's ward-ring on her right forefinger, a plain band of dull iron, and her nails were short and her hands had small white burn scars across the knuckles, the kind you got from handling things that bit.
"Do you have a list of these somewhere," she said, "or are you making them up as you go?"
"There's a list."
"May I see it?"
He gave her the protocol. It was only two pages. She read it standing in the doorway, while the wind blew dead leaves in around her ankles, and when she reached the end she looked up with an expression he couldn't read.
"Article One," she said. "Shall not touch the witness except to preserve life."
"That's right."
"You wrote this."
"I did."
"How very Gryffindor of you," Draconia said, and walked past him into the house, and as she passed, the hem of her coat brushed against his leg, and he felt it all the way up his spine like a struck match.
He stood in the open doorway for a moment, looking out at the empty moor and the sheep, and the low grey sky.
Seven days, he thought. Easy.
It was not easy.
She was awake before him every morning and had already made coffee, which was good, and had already read whatever book he'd left on the kitchen table, which was not, because she then wanted to argue about it. She sang in the bath, badly, in French. She left her curse-breaking tools all over every surface, little silver picks and lenses and a velvet roll of needles, and when he moved a set of them off his chair she said without looking up, "If you'd touched the third one from the left you'd have lost a finger, Potter. Lucky you didn't." She took over the woodburner as if it had always been hers and kept the house so hot that by the evening of the first day he was in his shirtsleeves, and she was curled in the armchair opposite in a cream jumper that slipped off one shoulder, with her bare feet tucked under her and a glass of the elf-made wine she had somehow smuggled into her trunk, watching him across the room.
"Why me?" he asked her, that first night. "Robards said you asked for me by name."
She took a sip of the wine. The firelight made her eyes look silver.
"Because the network I found goes into the Ministry," she said. "Into Transportation, into Magical Law Enforcement. Into your office, Potter. I don't know who. I don't trust any of them." She turned the glass in her fingers. "And you're the only Auror in Britain who I know for a fact can't be bought, because I watched people try for years and you were insufferable about it every single time."
"That's a compliment, is it?"
"It's a fact." She tilted her head and looked at him, long and slow, from his face all the way down to his rolled shirtsleeves and back up again, and her mouth curved in a way that made him want to go and stand outside in the cold for a while. "The compliment would be something else."
He looked away first. He looked at the fire. He reminded himself, very firmly, about Article One and Swansea and Dawlish the Younger crying into his bandages.
"Get some sleep," he said. "Long week."
"Goodnight, Potter."
It was a long time before he heard her go upstairs.
On the second night he woke at three in the morning with his wand already in his hand and no idea why.
The house was silent. The fire downstairs had burned low. Harry lay perfectly still, listening, and heard nothing but the wind, and the faint far-off complaint of a sheep. Then he heard it again, the thing that had woken him, a sound so soft he'd felt it more than heard it.
Someone was scratching at a window.
He was across the landing and through Draconia's door in three strides. She was already sitting up in bed, her ward-ring glowing a sullen dull red on her finger, and she put out a hand without looking at him and said, very quietly, "Don't."
On the outside of her window, pressed against the glass in the dark, was a sheet of parchment. There was no owl. There was no one holding it. It was simply there, hanging in the air on the other side of a Fidelius Charm that nobody in the world could see through but Robards, and as they watched, words began to burn across it in letters of dull orange fire.
You should have left the snuffbox alone, Miss Malfoy.
Harry felt every hair on his body stand up.
The parchment curled, blackened, and blew away into the night. The ward-ring on Draconia's finger faded slowly from red to iron grey. In the silence she turned and looked up at him, and her face was very white, and her voice when it came was perfectly level.
"Potter," she said. "Who else knows where we are?"